Course Description for Department of English Language and Literature

I. Language Skills Courses:

A. Basic Language Skills:

1. Reading Comprehension (0120113)

This is a foundation course for developing basic skills and strategies of reading comprehension. The skills include skimming, scanning, intensive and critical reading. The strategies comprise using the main meaning of new lexical items through contextual clues, understanding the main idea, identifying topics and topic sentences, finding supporting details and recognizing the methods of paragraph development, as a text unit.

2. Basic Writing: from Sentence to Paragraph (0120115)

The aim of this course is to enable the students to acquire the productive skill of language learning. The course is designed to help students practice writing sentences and well-organised and legible paragraphs, emulating discussion, comparison and contrast as well as descriptive models. Most importantly, the students are encouraged to be independent and think for themselves in order to be able to develop their own ideas.

3. Listening and Speaking (0120118)

This course aims at developing advanced oral skills. Students are trained to listen to details and infer meaning from context. In addition to these skills students get to be able to summarize main ideas, make inferences and draw conclusions. The course also aims at developing students’ conversational skills in various topics by working in small groups for discussions.

4. Learning English through Literature (0120210)

This course is meant to enable students to become conversant in literature and literary terms. Students are given the chance to read various pieces of literature representing literary genres. In addition to literature, language is focused on. This reinforcement is achieved through the pieces of literature assigned for intensive reading and discussion.

B. Advanced Language Skills:

5. Advanced Reading (0120214) (PR.0120113)

This course is a continuation of Reading Comprehension 0120113. It develops the art of critical appreciation by developing the powers of understanding, imagination, and reflection. These powers are part of any truly learning process. Students will learn the theory and practice the activity. The emphasis is on what students need for the material. Therefore, they will learn how to identify the main ideas and the main concepts. They will be trained in how to read and summarize the subjects they read in reports. Finally, students will be trained in how to fully understand and enjoy the material they read.

6.Advanced Writing :the Essay (0120216) (PR.0120115)

The aim of this course is to provide sufficient practice in written English to help students improve their writing skills and develop their own style. The course involves the students in practicing writing on college-essay models, e.g. argumentative, comparison and contrast, descriptive discussion, expository, etc. Furthermore, this course is designed to help students summarize long passages into one fourth or one fifth of their original length and write coherent essays through a clearly laid-out outline. The course also provides opportunities for all students to practice creative writing such as short stories, short poems, and critical-writing.

7. Debate and Dialogue (0120319) (PR. 0120118)

This course develops the students ability and confidence to initiate and respond appropriately. Moreover , The course helps students to communicate with greater degree of success in certain situation and it develops their oral fluency in speech in which functional communication is essential for mutual understanding.

8. Grammar (0120227) (PR 0130102.)

This course reinforces the students’ understanding of Basic Grammar students exposed to in 0130101 & 0130102 in an indirect and subtle way and consolidates their knowledge of grammar by introducing them to the types of sentences, sentence connection, the complex sentence, the verb and its complementation as well as word-formation. The successful completion of this course means the student is able to communicate using correct and proper English in different situations. The course is supplemented with a workbook.

2. Language Courses:

A. Complusory Courses:-

1. Linguistics (0120220) (PR. 0120221)

This course aims at acquainting students with linguistics as the science of language study, its aims , aspects and relations to other social sciences and fields. It also aims at acquainting the students with the nature of human language and it characteristics, components and functions. Special emphasis will be laid on the components of English, besides other languages when found appropriate.Aditionally , they will be exposed to some grammar ,phonetics ,phonology,morphology,syntax,semantics.pragmatics and language acquisition,because this course is a pre-requiente for all language courses.

2. Phonetics (0120234) (PR: 0120118)

This is an introductory course starting with the essential basics of general phonetics and procedes to cover the English sound system at the segmental and prosodic levels. The course is supposed to cover the theoretical aspects and the practical aspects of the general and English phonetics. At the theoretical level it covers how the speech sounds in general are classified and described and how sounds are organized to make up syllables, words and longer utterances. At the practical level, students are required to represent utterances, linguistic and nonsensical in terms of phonetic scripts, after covering all the possible consonantal and vocalic sounds which may exist in any language. This has to do with the segmental and suprasegmantal features in general. The part concerned with general phonetics is indispensible for proceding to English phonetics. Theoretically, the student is supposed to be able to understand the English language sound system, segmentally and suprasegmentally and able to produce the elements as natively as possible. In the practical side the students will be trained to write English utterances in terms of phonetic scripts starting from the sound and proceding to any longer utterance. At the end students are supposed to speak and understand English utterances at the best possible standard.

3. Syntax ( 0120325) (PR 0120220.)

This course provides a general survey of the assumption and techniques of the analysis of syntactic and morphological structures. Syntax provides students with the analysis of sentences in terms of categories and functions in the phrasal level and sentential level. Morphology studies the word structure, processes of affixation and derivation. Relevant morpho- phonemic processes are also studied as they pertain to changes of word structure . It also covers rules of word formation like compounding, blending, back- formation, acronyms, abbreviations,etc.

4. Phonology (0120335) (PR.01202)

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a solid, clear and practical grounding in the phonological system of English. The students study the functional aspect of the phoneme, the distinctive features and the phonlogical processes that alter, delete, insert or metathesize basic sounds in an utterance. It also covers rules that govern the prosody of English including stress, intonation and rhythm. (segmental and supra- sehmental phonology).

5.Morphonology (0120336) (PR.01202)

This course aims at studying the phonological and morphological systems of English. In phonology the student studies the functional aspect of the phoneme, the distinctive features and the phonological processes that alter, delete, insert or metathesize basic sounds in an utterance. It also covers rules that govern the prosody of English including stress, intonation and rhythm. Morphology studies the word structure in English, processes of affixation and derivation. Relevant morpho-phonemic processes are also studied as they pertain to changes of word structure. It also covers rules of word formation like compounding, blending, back-formation, acronyms, abbreviations, etc.

6. Semantics (0120426) (PR 0120220.)

The fundamental goal of this course is to introduce the science which studies linguistic meaning and enable the student to comprehend the meaning of what he reads or listens to. It teaches the student that the meaning is the combination of word meaning, sentence meaning and his knowledge of the order of words. Therefore, it is vital that the student become acquainted with lexical semantics, phrasal semanticsand sentencial semantics and pragmatics. The student is expected, at the end of this course, to understand the intricacies of what is said fairly discriminately. Topics like lexical ambiguity, structural ambiguity, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy and entailment will be introduced.

7. Discourse Analysis (0120424) (PR 0120220.)

This course aims at providing students with the necessary information and skills that enable them to look into the English utterance beyond the sentence level in both spoken and written context, and those that enable them to analyse discourse in the light of the models and theories that investigate discourse in both its formal and textual contexts. These skills should help the students see what impact meaning has on the utterance in terms of its social and textual contexts. Eventually, this will help students speak and write the language in a way that best represents its social implications as they occur in the real- life situations.

B. Elective Courses:-

8. Sociolinguistics(0120328) (PR 0120220.)

In this course , sociolinguistics is taught as a branch of linguistics that studies language in relation to society. In this sense, the language used tends to vary. This variation is the result of many different factors such as: religion, age, ethnicity, sex, etc. Thus, language used by men differs from that used by women and the language used by adults differs from that used by youngsters. It shows that the combination of these components bears influence on language acquisition and language use.

9. Stylistics (0120422) (PR 0120220.)

This course will focus on the application of linguistic knowledge to the study of style. Traditionally stylistic analysis has been mainly concerned with the analysis of literary style or the language variety characteristic of a writer, and various criteria have been set up to deal with individual or group styles in relation to biographical, psychological, social and other details reflecting the personality of its creator.Different texts will be handled : literature , media , law , among others

10. Seminer in Language (0120481) (PR 0120220.)

The aim of this course is to provide students with the opportunity to tackle a topic in language that is not covered by any particular course in the curriculum. It should be planned to evoke in the students the spirit of collective work to encourage initiatives and free expression of views. The choice of topics is left to the teachers.

3. Literature Courses:

A. Complusory Courses:

1. Introduction to Literature (0120251) (PR.0130102)

The course familiarizes students with the various literary genres and the literary terms they will come across when reading literary works. It provides the students with necessary knowledge needed for other literature sybjects. The course helps students to develop a literary appreciation when reading and helps them to be able to comment on and analyze a literary text.

2. Poetry(0120353) (P.R.0120251)

This course is intended to give undergraduate students an adequate idea about the themes and conventions of English poetry from the sixteenth century to the present (Renaissance,Classical,Romantic,Victorian and Modern).That is, it will attempt to cover such topics as the emergence of the sonnet and the sonnet sequence, metaphysical poetry, pastoral poetry, satiric poetry, and Romantic poetry, and modern poetry. Students will be trained to read and comprehend poetry , know the aesthetic features , figure of speech such as simile , metaphore …etc. Poems of major poets such as Marlow ,Sydni , Milton, Wordsworth , among others are assigned to student to analyse and comment on to come up with the features of poetry in the eras mentioned above .

3. Novel (0120356) (PR.0120251)

This course is intended to get students acquainted with the English novel and its traditions. This is done through reading, analyzing and discussing three or four novels at least. The purpose of this analysis is to enable students to understand the novels discussed and to make it easy for them to make the connection between the world of each novel and the world they live in, and to facilitate their reading on their own. This course also develops the students’ aesthetic appreciation and critical skills. In addition to this, it shows the development of the novel in the 17th, 18th, .19th, 20th centuries.

4. Drama (0120354) (PR.0120251)

This course covers a long and very rich and varied period of English drama. From Shakespeare and his contemporaries, to the drama of humors and the drama of manners, the student will have a chance to grasp the basic elements of drama in actual instances, and will learn a great deal about people's interests and life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As far as possible the selection to be studied will be representative of this long period. Three dramas will be studied in full, and some five dramas will be prepared by groups of students, to be the subject of tutorials and presentations.

5. American Literature (0120458) (PR.0120251)

This course acquaits students with American literature from its beginnings up to the present day. It involves indepth readings and discussions of selected novels, poems, plays and short stories. This selection includes works by major writers such as Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Miller and Williams to name but a few. The purpose of these readings is to demonstrate the development of American literature throughout the ages and its growing importance at present. This course also sheds light on the literary movements, the literary history, and the general characteristics of American culture.

The course introduces students to the milestones of literary criticism from Plato to the modern age. Students study representative positions on representation, truth, and form. They also study the relationship between literature, morality and politics. Students are encouraged to develop their own critical perspectives visa-vis the assumptions, conceptions or ideas they study.

7. Literary Text Analysis (0120486) (PR.0120251)

In this course, students will develop the skill of close reading and analyzing a number of literary texts, chosen from both the major Greek classics and from modern British and American works. Specific questions will be posed before and after the text is taken up for analysis and such questions may require some research outside the text. The most important ideas of the text will be identified. It will be noted that a text is always open to a diversity of approaches. Some critical theories will be reviewed and applied to the text under study. In all cases, the purpose will develop students' critical judgment.

B. Elective Courses:-

8. World Literature (0120459) (PR. 0120251)

The course is intended to familiarize students with selections of literary works, classical and modern, translated into English. Novels, plays, poems and epics by major international writers are analyzed and commented on. Light should be shed on similarites and differences between the literary works chosen.

9. Seminer in Literature (0120482) (PR 0120251)

This is an open course intended to enhance the research, summarizing and practical skills of students through working on selected literary movements, texts, writers, poets and playwrights. It involves students’ literary topic of interest. Special attention is given to illustrating some literary concepts, such as feminism, modernism, classicism, to name only a few.

4. Scientific Research Courses:

A. Complusory Courses:-

1. Research Project (0120498) (P.R.0111161)

The Research Project, which must be carried out in the second half of the last year of study, is an important integrative course, which invites the students to apply their knowledge, skills, and academic ability to a specific problem or issue in one of the areas which the Department programme covers. The project demands skills in researching and documenting materials, and in fine verbal and written expression. It encourages the students to tackle issues of their liking, although they have to discuss their choice of topic with their tutors and the Department before they can proceed with their projects. To ensure that the work meets the standards which characterize the Research project, a project supervisor is appointed to monitor students’ work on their projects. The supervisor advises the students and reviews the developing versions of their work. Upon submission, the project is assessed by a committee appointed by the Department/Head. The committee consists of two internal examiners in addition to the project supervisor. The time allocated to the project is one semester.

5. Translation Courses:-

A. Complusory Courses:-

1. General Translation (0120372) (PR 0120220.)

The objective of this course is to give students practical applications of the principles and techniques of translation .Different texts in various fields of knowledge will be translated in class in addition to take-home assignments. Also specialized texts in Arabic and English are translated. Texts are selected from politics, economics, history, psychology, and sociology, in order to enrich the student’s knowledge of writing techniques in both the SL and the TL.

6. Supporting Courses:

A. Complusory Courses:-

1. Methods of TEFL(1) (PR. (PR 0120220.) (0120462 +0120251)

This course aims at introducing students to the historical developments of the different methods and approaches of teaching English as a foreign language (Grammar-Translation Method, Direct Method, Audiolingual Method, Cognitive Approach and Communicative Approach) in connection with the different schools of thought. In addition, the course offers practical application of the theoretical basis of the Communivative Approach.

2. Methods OF TEFL(2) (0120463) (PR.0120462)

This is both a theoretical and a practical course. It aims at developing effective teaching skills and strategies in teaching a foreign language using some of the effective methods and approaches taken in 0120462. Students are also trained in utilizing effective techniqus for teachnig specific activities and language skills. The course elaborates on the techniqus of teaching specific activities and language skills. The course makes use of observation demonstration, micro-teaching and evaluation.

3. Western Culture and Thought ( 0111138)

This course deals with western civilisation and thought along major historical epochs including: Greek and Roman, the Middle Ages, the European Renaissance, Modern time and its major achievements, the development of the scientific revolution and rationalism, the development of political thought and organization, the industrial revolution, and the relation between the West and the world.